Yahoo Directory Shut Down & Zeef emerged

Yahoo! would be shutting down the very directory it built its fortune on, it seems wistfully poetic to me that as one human-edited directory leaves us, a new player, ZEEF, has emerged. People are still dealing with online information overload. Particularly when searching outside their comfort zone. We believe that using human expertise as a filter is the ultimate solution.Crowd sourcing of knowledge and curation is made practically achievable and easy with ZEEF.

What Is ZEEF?

ZEEF.com has picked up $2.38M in funding in the past ten months, the latest being a $1.55M Series A (EURO) funding round in September, according to TechCrunch.

ZEEF’s funding and current PR surge is fortuitous timing, certainly; but, we all know the challenges faced by human-powered efforts to organize and link to everything on the web.

Just look at Yahoo, LookSmart/Zeal, the Open Directory (DMOZ), Wikia search, Mahalo – even Lycos took a crack it back in 1999. (And who besides NBC’s former accountants remembers SNAP?)

It seems there remains an innate human desire to organize, catalog, link and curate the web, regardless of the seeming impossibility such an endeavor represents.

Enter Amsterdam-based ZEEF (the Dutch translation of “sift”). ZEEF describes itself as “an expert-filtered link directory to help people find the most relevant links to support their buying decisions.” Below are some excerpts from ZEEF’s vision statement:

Vision

We filter the world’s information with human knowledge

Our mission is to help curators create subject pages, share their knowledge and help consumers find the right information. Quickly, easily and effectively.

Information Overload

While Algorithmic Search has come a long way, the internet still presents people with a serious information overload. The amount of digital data created, reproduced, and consumed is growing exponentially and doubling every two years. Can’t see the forest for the trees? At ZEEF, we believe that the answer lies in social, crowd-sourced curation of information by passionate individuals.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts are manipulating Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to obtain or increase free traffic. SEO has become a significant industry and search engines have difficulty filtering this out. Especially when searching outside their areas of expertise, just like in normal life, people like to rely on expert knowledge.

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Milan Tomic

Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.

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